The Lights On Broadway
by civilianstick
Summary: Wario saw the lights go out on Broadway.
1. The Daying Life of Agriculture

Wario saw the lights go out on Broadway.

The road disappeared from beneath him, and for an instant he was standing on something pretentious like a voidal waste, before common sense and the auxiliary power kicked in at once and his corpulent frame basked (as much as a frame can bask – a humorous absurdity) in the comfortingly rational incandescence. He wondered why they had done it.

"Why did they do that?" he wondered amusingly, making you laugh. He wondered and pondered, and squandered his remaining time. "I don't want to go back there," mumbled reluctant Wario, who didn't want to go back at all.

"Oh, go on," said Barry Road Way, the proprietor of Broadway Corp, from down the Barry Road Way, which had been snappily named after he in 2008 when Broadway was established. Or was it the other way round? Wario had always known him as Waluigi. "Go on, Wario. Come back to us."

"I just don't have the money," Wario said, very sadly. He said it badly too – he slurred and tripped over those fat lips of his, his biggy ziggy moustache flapping with every exhaled phoneme, of which there were many because like you and me, Wario spoke the English language.

"Go onnn," Barry said, his voice silky smooth and shiny-toothed. Barry shone when he spoke. Wario was a bit jealous of him sometimes. He could still remember their first interaction, when they met in the bowels of Trowel Academy, that most ivory of towers in Diamond City where the two of them had flirted with everything – the local totty, each other, the faculty, but mostly the idea of a career in that most platinum of ideals, that most argent of lifestyles, the Daying Life of Agriculture.

* * *

 **CHAPTER 1**

* * *

 _ **THE DAYING LIFE OF AGRICULTURE**_

* * *

"Argh," Wario enounced morosely.

"Urgh," the one he called Waluigi announced mostly. With the rest of his words, he used his neck muscles to direct them to his friend, the one next to him – not that fat fool Wario, him and his snuffling snout and his crippling addictions, but the one he could really say he sort of loved. A bit. Maybe a few bits. How many bits in a bot? Waluigi couldn't remember.

Los of things were starting to evade his mind as of late. Just this past week, every instruction he'd taken in during his youth on how to clench a fist had just gone, replaced by some song he'd heard during his Toadco Shaturday Shopping Shpree (SHASHOSHP). One of those radio songs, played on those damned speakers. He'd love them to become non-speakers. Mutes. He'd love to rip out the condescending fucking tongues of every one of them. But that could wait, for a later date. His hunger he would sate, but first he needed to speak to Kate.

"Play us a song, Barry," was all she had to say in return. In return to what? He'd forgotten already. Who was Kate?

She wasn't there. Oh, yes she was. Right there. On that spot. You know, Barry. That spot. That fat spot.

"You're being silly again," she said with a mote of caution, and a mite of causation. "Play it, you big welly head."

He hadn't the heart to tell her he couldn't remember a thing about playing music. His lips wobbled, upper and lower, in a kind of beautiful harmony. A thousand melodies dissolved into his addled, rattling, embattled, prattling mind, but they vanished with little more than a horizontal wipe every time his mind's hand made a furtive grasp for the things.

What was his name?

It was Barry. Always Barry. Never not Barry. Never knot Barry. Don't do it.

Who told him that? Wario. Who was Wario?

The man standing down the road seemed a stranger. Quivering jowls communicated intimidation rather than that soothing kind of pliability he'd come to look to in times of life-strife. Barry started to shake, mind, body and soul, and his moustache drooped. It was really funny.

A thousand years grasping, a thousand years chasing his sanity, packed into a single hypersonic minute of mental action. Truly mental action it was. His mind was on a mad one. There were eagles in his daydreams, diamonds in his eyes. But what kind of star was Barry?

The star of Broadway. Of course. Wario needed to come back to Broadway.

But how? For that matter, who? Wasn't he... some classmate?

He couldn't take his eyes off of the looming squatness down the road, so he just lashed out at Kate and struck her to get her attention. She wasn't there. Was she in reach? Was she there to teach him anything? She was an angel, wasn't she? That was why she came to him.

It wasn't Kate. It couldn't have been. Barry couldn't look at people whose names started with K. It was a comical genetic thing. He bloody loved that comic, he did. _Arseholes Who Can't Look At People Whose Names Begin With K_. Seminal work in the funny titled media field. The laugh track in Barry's head was stuck on a loop. One day he'd get tired of it, he was sure, but it was nice all the same to have that backing. Whatever he said, someone would find it funny. I can relate.

Have you met me?

What a stupid question. Who hadn't met Barry Chuckle? That elicited a chuckle or two from the mental crowd, who were taking off their t-shirts and chucking bottles of napalm at him in some throe of heavenly elation where logical thought was held hostage by craze and waterboarded by frenzy. Bottles of napalm. He wasn't sure that was how it worked. But it was funny. The idea brought him even more recursive laughs.

How was the stand up circuit like in his head? He had some great setups about additional marijuana.

What had he been moping about before? This was clearly the route to take.

Toadette. That was her name. Not Kate. He couldn't strike her because she was about two and a half feet tall. That was so funny, he just about burst his appendix.

He fell to the ground shoulders-first, ungainly, like a puppet structurally collapsing like a tower struck by nefarious government schemes like an ice sculpture meeting a hot air vent like you choosing to read a fanfiction about Wario.

This wasn't Wario's story anymore. This was Waluigi's.

But he was already dead.

* * *

Dave Mario woke to a naked bulb on (or was that off?) the ceiling and (rather less excitingly) a naked Peach Toadstool in the bulbous bed that humorously resembled a mushroom, which he slept in most nights. Some nights he didn't sleep at all, out of worry for Luigi or whatever else it was.

This part of the chapter was going to be brief, out of a lack of interest for Mario. Dave, though, he always preferred Dave. Calling him Mario was too... too Mushroomarvel. That was the Mushroom Kingdom's equivalent to Marvel, the multimedia entertainment corporation of our world responsible for such hits as The Amazing Spider-Man, The Defenders, Tales of Suspense as well as second-rate drivel like Iron Man and the vapid so-called stories of the supposedly Incredible Hulk.

Dave was what he was born with. That was what mama gave him. Her first gift... and her last, as it happened. But it wasn't the last thing she ever did for him. Before she took that Warp Pipe home from the Mushroom City General Hospital and was snaffled up by a hungry Piranha Plant in a grisly slapstick fashion, she put an order in for another son, which the infernal stork dropped off like it was nothing about a week later. Luigi was taller and leaner than pudgy little pudgeball Dave, and he loved stories, because he was a infantile whelp who didn't like sports.

He loved in particular the story he made up to explain their most peculiar preadolescence situation, growing up with nary a parent nor guardian in sight. He decided that they were both ordered via storkmail, and that an evil wizard stole Luigi mid-flight. Dave, he said, fell to a tropical island below, where the native dinosaurs cooperated as a herd to save him from harm and reunite him with his beloved brother, drawing tongue-in-cheek comparisons with the plot of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.

Dave had never liked the stories. He was kind of an unlikeable prick, which you must have come here expecting. It's in fashion, or was 11 years ago when I last paid attention to Mario fanfiction. You ever go to Lemmy's Land?

But now, of course, Luigi was off living his high-falutin' life as an unexplained missing person.

He went to bed in tears sometimes. Dave, that is. Who knows what Luigi did before bed these days? He probably didn't even have a bed. Maybe he'd already gone, to be with the Yoshis in that balmy paradise of his own design. Or was it Yoshies? The inscription on the action figure Luigi had commissioned had the E, he was pretty sure. But it didn't make any grammatical sense. But, but but but, Luigi was a stickler for grammar. Of course he was, the weedy little mouthbreathing loser.

It didn't make sense to Mario. Nothing made sense when he was this uncomfortable. And like a neat Sim surrounded by puddles of dishwasher leakage, he felt most uncomfortable at all times in this place. This penthouse, this prison of Princess Peach's vile rosy design.

He shot a glance at the slight slutlet splayed under the fungus fibre quilt. Her noodly arm stuck out from the textile sandwich like a stick of succulent celery untouched by the sweaty peanut butter jumble within, brushing against his big bad gut. He drank in the perfume, the body odour, the hairless pink crook of that fabulously foul elbow of hers, and everything that adorned it. That tattoo, her last bruise, the bionic gear.

Living with a princess was stifling. No other word could describe the smotherance, the suffocation, the synonyms for stiflement. There was never air to breathe, never in-betweens; these nightmares always hung on past the dream.

He looked away, out of the stained-glass windows of the apartment; but he couldn't ignore the abstract likeness of the tasteless tart beside him blown into each one, not with that kind of weather. There was no sunshine. No you and me. There were no good times. How impossibly queer.

Dave Mario leaned back, and sunk into his pillow. He contemplated the ups and downs of jumping, but came to the same conclusions as usual. The same shit, on what he hoped was a different day. It was hard to tell with how murky and grey the outside un-view was.

Then he decided to kill Wario.


	2. And Then The Chapter Ended

When Wario heard the news, he couldn't sing the blues. Not anymore. Not for any mundane reason – he was certainly still blue, especially after the untimely demise of that one who'd gone, that egregiously specious friendly friend who'd met an end before they'd had time to mend, the two of them.

The two of them. God, that hurt to mentally narrate. Wario was lost. Actually, Waluigi was the one really lost. Wario was just lost figuratively because of the loss of poor lost Waluigi, whose lost soul was surely lost to the lost realm of lost souls by now. A terrible numbing frost had done whatever frost does to appear in the morning on grass, except it was on Wario's own soul, which wasn't lost. How could it be lost? It was right here. He tapped his chest with a meaty fist, and just to make sure he was right he gave his dorsal flab a short but taut one-inch punch which made his whole breadth tremble in a most tremulous tremanner.

The trepanner.

That had to be the solution.

The next paragraph started with a pronoun or definite article beginning with "th". You didn't like that much, but I thought it had a kind of beauty to it.

Wario stopped before he could start. Heard the news? What? Had he his head bopped? He was there, fair and square. He saw Barry drop. That horrid little toadling had something to do with it, he was sure. The trepanner would let him know for sure, and reinforce his surety. And his sanity to boot.

What had he stopped doing? Why didn't he finish the third sentence, explaining why he couldn't sing the blues? Surely these pondrances would let me get away with whatever the name for this kind of narrative style, whatever it's called; line of thought or something. Train of thought? Line of questioning. Trail of consciousness. Branching consciousness. Floating timeline. Unreliable narrator. Bleeding heart. Soliloquy. Diarrhoea. Travelling with the ball. Whatever it is, if I make jokes about how bad it is I can get away with it. Isn't it bad? That's postmodernism.

Wario couldn't sing the blues anyway. He had developed a photographic cough in his youth, an amusingly unconventional juxtaposition of wordians, which made you think I was intelligent. It meant he couldn't sing the blues. That was why he couldn't sing the blues, not because of the death. When Barry Road Way breathed his last breath, rattling and hoarse like a rattlesnake on a horse, and took a greedy mouthful of tarmac, his brother-in-arms had felt so bad, so terrible, so not glad, so unbearable, that he felt like ripping his own arms off. Those thick arms, with their biceps and triceps and quadriceps and bones. Engorged with viscous bloodstuff, the fulsome girth of Wario's daddy-limbs were the only collective rock for the lost little boy of but a half-dozen moon-cycles that now stood, shaking and quaking and forgetting how to baking, on the road so callously named after he who now lay in a most compromising position of eternal intimacy, lips hungrily curled around the biggest bits of roadstuff dislodged by Waluigi's titanic cranium and its titanicer nosedive.

The thought turned Wario's morbid gut, so much so that he was forced to deploy the arms to correct it before his inner ears got confused and he fell upside down.

There was clearly no recourse for this. If the trepanner couldn't help, nobody would be able to. Least of all that fractional femme fatale in her fetching fuchsia frock, Toadette – the Terrible and Tiny Termagant, as she was known back at the Academy or whatever it was called.

His memory was going too. That was perhaps a bigger concern, in the long-concern-term, than the untimely demise of Waluigi.

Oh, Waluigi. If Wario hadn't expended all his crying energy between chapters in one great heaving sob that shed enough litres of saltwater to fill the Mushroom-Shaped Crater adjacent to Broadway and justify re-christening it with tongue in cheek as the Mushroom-Shaped Dead Ringer For The Dead Sea, he would be having a good cry for his fallen ally, that harsh white lhite illuminating the soft curves of his face as he'd weep in fury, consumed by hatred of the very concept of death. How dare it dare to strike him here, where it hurt? Right in the friend-bone.

He'd have to bury Waluigi's bones soon.

He somehow found it in him to cry, and did.

The trepanner didn't live. Far away, that is. Wario allowed himself a coy smile at that bit of mindplay he performed upon himself, then returned to weeping, now for being such a plasticene-brained puddle of pliable Playdoh; a suggestible Susan, a manipulable Michael, a weak-willed Wario. For truly he was weak, and David Marius strong. This much he had always known, yet he'd failed to date to come clean about this secret understanding of the true order of things, so Dave and his brother had gone their whole kidulthood foolishly thinking that he and Wario – no, Waluigi, the friend he'd so loved who was now so dead – were labouring under the delusion that they themselves, always mediocre, always one ugly elf-step behind, were somehow superior in any way to that veritable trough of veritable toughness and athleticism and good looks and impeccable grooming and that lovely smell he exuded.

Not Luigi. Luigi smelled of spit and kept lice in his hat. He played Monopoly by himself and posed with his puerile anime dinosaur dolls for family photos. They were related, you see, distantly. Cousins of cousins of cousins. Refer to the official Mario timeline for more info.

Luigi was a load that Wario was sure Dave was better off without having to take time out of his day to open the catflap or clean up his discharge. Yoshi may have been a faithful steed in those stories of his, but Luigi was the real animal in that house.

Wario held a little more distaste for the man than his older, more mature, more likeable, more appealing, more gainly, more pleasantly shaped brother. He wasn't a man to sling shit for spit, but sometimes shit had to be slung before someone got stung. That was the most valuable lesson Dave ever taught Wario in their years of housesharing, between his graduation from the Academy and the success of his microgame business that brought him back to the city that he loved. Diamond City.

Wario loved City. He loved City and pity and Nitty-Gritty.

But he had to leave some day. Perhaps today was the day.

Turning 180 degrees, finally peeling his ocuballs from the scene of the crime, he took one plod, then another, turning the individual motions into an elaborate sequence that built momentum until he was plodding with some speed back down the Barry Road Way, away from Broadway and Barry Road Way, who now lay dead as a dipshit on Barry Road Way, a ways away from Wayrio, who was on his way home.

Police lights flashed past him, the Doppler Effect humorously modifying the sound of their sirens as they drew near and zung past, no doubt summoned by that shrieking shrimplet in her pastel pinafore, but Wario had no time to dwell on such trifles. The pavement, or sidewalk, was narrow and poorly maintained – after all, who would walk to Broadway? The very notion was so unthinkable that he stalled for a second trying to think about it and had to distract himself with an assessment of the air temperature before he could resume the ploddance (11 degrees, you choose the unit, mostly humid) – but his dainty feeties had no trouble as he nimbly strode from crooked paving square to jagged flagstone, and even to the softer bits of vaguely floral dirt in between the two when his soft soles grew agitated and needed a quick break. A peculiar kind of determination had taken him fully; his every so-sure step felt pre-ordained, and never once did he slip or trip or lose his grip. The plan was simple and clear: first home – Broadway was satisfyingly close to the central city where he lived, so t'were only a shaltie walkie – then to the trepanner's office, or his house of wares – whichever seedy backstreet venue Mouser pointed him to. Then on further forth, whencever his tentative ally directed him.

He wouldn't be coming back to the city in a hurry once he left. The lease was ending on the mansion soon, and truth be told he was sick of its stink, its sickly stink, and then the chapter ended.

* * *

 **CHAPTER TWO**

* * *

 _ **AND THEN THE CHAPTER ENDED**_

* * *

Mario reached Broadway around the same time as Captain Toad of the Toad Brigade, arriving in his lovely little mushroom-shaped police go-kart that made him laugh.

"How did you get here so fast?" he enquired politely. The captain gave him a curt look; Toadette gave him a skirt hook, which he discarded faster than an alien inadvertently falling in love with the bubbly mortal source of the energy he needs to rejuvenate his dying evil world-tree.

"What do you think?" Toad said brusquely. Mario was on the cusp of striking him right there. His name was Dave, not Mario. His surname was being referred to just now, not his forename. We're not on very close terms.

"I suppose a Boosty Go Forth," said Dave adverbially. Toad gave another curt nod, then turned to his green-spotted lieutenant. "Kurt!"

"Aye-aye, Captain Toad," said Kurt.

"Lieutenant Kurt, are you hurt?"

"Nay-nay, Captain Toad."

"Then don't blurt, Lieutenant Kurt."

Kurt said nothing.

"That's so much better that I am now really happy," said Captain Toad, his face grim and laced as straight as ever.

"So who did it, do you think?" Mario asked, interrupting the conversation. Kurt had always been a little scared of Dave, so he made himself scarce, escorting Toadette to the passenger kart.

"We have a few suspects already," said Captain Toad, not lifting his eyes from his little shroomy notebook. The surface paper had the same silky white lustre that Dave had come to expect from the FKPC, but the impressively neat shorthand notes the captain was scribbling were speckled with soggy grey, making a couple of i dots and t crosses smear into the inky paper splotchery (a funny neologism); as God was his witness, fat raindrops fell, few but heavy, plinking and plonking a tuneless symphony with flat wet slappy taps on their headgears and making Broadway's effervescent neon visage look that bit more magical.

Magical wasn't the best word for it now though, not with the grisly gruesomeness currently being analysed by the Koopi (the correct demonym for the people of Koopland) forensic team on loan to the Toad Brigade from the currently-inactive Koopa Troop. Or maybe it was (magical that is, in regards to the best word to describe Broadway at this moment in time); Dave's mind was more wracked than before, with the whats and the whos and the running out of steam for coming up with words to pad the chapter, but he wasn't here for the crime scene, though it did reinforce his predominant desire.

Waluigi was dead. That was cause to celebrate in itself; the ugly fucking stick insect's demise brought him such joy that he could nearly forget the night terrors, the too-vivid visions of Luigi, naked and shivering under a cold moon. But it also let him do away with the remorse already threatening to build up in his thick, healthy, well-fused skull, around the hollow interior where his average-sized brain was kept.

Waluigi was dead. And Wario must have killed him.

He didn't linger at the scene any longer than the Toad Brigade. By the time that spineless sycophant Toady had pedalled his nasty nitwit newsbike halfway down the Royal Raceway to investigate for the Toad Town Times, Dave was cruising down the overpass above the cycling fungal ratworm, heading straight for Diamond City.

* * *

 **CHAPTER 3**

* * *

 _ **DIAMOND CITY**_


	3. That Sort Of Thing

The Sun shone on Wario's shining scalp, pale and taut as his own elbow. Hard and heavy, it beat down on his bare headage like the guilt he'd found wracking his being every night. One day the guilt would actually dent his skull.

He hadn't planned on losing the hair. He'd been working on it – gradually, mind you, a minor side project in an oft-forgotten drawer in his mental executive office – for what was really, now he looked back, most of his life. There'd been minor alterations here and there, a precautionary biannual snipping to keep it in control, but on the whole it'd been a fairly reliable mainstay in his bodily inventory for as long as he could remember. Someone else must have been taking care of it before then; probably his mother. She was known for that sort of thing.

* * *

 **CHAPTER 3**

* * *

 _ **THAT SORT OF THING**_


	4. Cosmic Hands

**CHAPTER 4: COSMIC HANDS**

Whwwerewe did Mario go?

Did Mario go slow, or did he go "Whoa!"?

Wario would never know; or so he thought, but the reality was the truth was there, in the air, if he could only bear to see it through.

H e couldn't. He was too weak and pathetic.

Toady was weak and pathetic too. Everyone was weak and pathetic.

This man must have been weak and pathetic too, the one who stood now over him as he'd done over Waluigi.

Who was that man?

Wario would have liked to have shaken his hand.

Love was far away, and it felt like the tunnel betwixt Wario and true satisfaction had been twisted in firm cosmic hands so that the way forward would never be clear again.

In the days after the end of the incident, people kept on doing exactly what they had been doing before, and what they intended upon doing after, except for those with ambition to change their lives.

Wario didn't die after all. Mario's quibble was resolved, Princess Peach given a caution by the Mushroom Commission for Human Rights, and a small grave was erected for Barry in the Piranha Gardens. There was a planter before it, but nobody ever brought flowers. The biggest tribute he got was from his own damned venture; when the lights went out on Broadway, Wario felt like he would melt from the anguish as it seared his unrubbed skin.

The biggest hurdle they could all see, on the night when they gathered at Luigi's Mansion to solemnly usher out the old (the lost and the dead) and in the new (the found and the alive), was a great colossal thing that cast a terrible shadow over Mushroom City. The ribbon in the stars, strewn by those same hands that had deformed Wario's at-the-time Tunnel of Love, spilling across the galaxy in its oh-so-vibrant spectrum.

Once in a while, Wario fantasised of visiting the Rainbow Road.

He started dreaming about Luigi, several weeks after his city-imposed exile, and this led him to Cool, Cool Mountain, where he sought the counsel of the venerable Snowman Head. There he received several gold nuggets of wisdom, and some advice with them.

"Your future does not lie in what you are doing or have done," the snowman head said, as Wario's beastly denim jacket curled and whined in the shocking cold, and beneath them his priestly denim dungarees contorted and knotted in silent discomfort. "You are a problem-solver. Your problems have been solved, but now you must become the problem-solver. There are many people whose problems you must solve, Wario. Among them are Mario and Luigi, the star-crossed brothers, and Yoshi, him without an history you can perceive but so close to your bosom you may surrender your heart upon learning the sad truth, and Mouser, whom the Demon King Bowser loathes. Before you can solve their problems, Wario, you must seek a position in the government of your homeland, and proffer your cunning solutions to the problems of the people of the state. This is your destiny."

"I understand," said Wario, though truly he did not. "So I must shoulder the burdens of all living creatures with the capacity to feel fear and pain? Am I a Messiah?"

"You are Wario," said the snowman head.

"I know," said Wario. After some time had passed in freezing silence, he added: "I find this awesome destiny weighs my own heart down with a ghastly kind of fear."

"And that, in the end, is your true burden," said the snowman head. "Also, Mario is your son."

Wario turned away, and looked out into the blue beyond so that the tears in his eyes could be mistaken for reflections of the sky as well as the bleeding of his cyan eyeshadow. "I understand," he said again, and took his leave. "I will do what I must."

As the polar winds picked up once more, it was hard to hear the head's sober farewell: "You will try."


End file.
